TheVat

Sociopath and psychopath are both used to refer to what's clinically known as ASPD, or antisocial personality disorder. What's disturbing is that the horrible things that happen in war are mostly done by ordinary people who are not in the 1-2% of the population estimated to have ASPD. Plain old human nature, conditioned in a certain way, can wreak atrocities.

I look at voting from the perspective of collective action. Which works when people believe in it. My individual vote doesn't probably make a difference but the votes of everyone like me do. So it's something one could view as an expression of confidence in yourself as part of a larger whole that is a democracy. It has a psychological value, overcoming stasis and apathy and cynicism, which ripples causally through the rest of your life. And who knows it might encourage someone else you know to vote. So there's a sort of chain reaction possibilty there, maybe. I'd encourage all you butterflies to flap the wings a bit.

I keep seeing comments from IntoSci et al mischaracterized this way, and am still puzzled. I think people are especially sensitized to the real issues of homophobic oppression, so that even harmless distaste comes under the lens of what-must-be-fixed. In a few years hopefully things will reach some normality where personal differences of taste and preference can be laughed about and not taken as a threat.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/claims-about-pentagon-ufo-program-how-much-is-true/ (from the SWR section of article) Supposedly haunted and filled with all kinds of cryptids and paranormal phenomena, it was purchased in 1996 by Robert Bigelow to study its alleged phenomena. Members of Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) stayed on the ranch to do a careful first hand study. One of them was Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., co-author of the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker. Another was Dr. Eric Davis, an astronomer who now works at Dr. Hal Puthoff’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, studying weird physics. Despite Bigelow’s funding and the investigators’ unfettered access to the alleged phenomena, So, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men and all the King’s cameras and electronic recording devices could not document anything paranormal occurring at the Skinwalker Ranch, in spite of scientists spending several years onsite trying to do so. NIDS never did document anything much happening anywhere, so Bigelow shut down NIDS in 2004. In 2016 he sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate, LLC, whose once-anonymous owner has just revealed himself to be Brandon Fugal, a wealthy real estate investor from Salt Lake City. Fugal had previously been involved in weird science projects, like “an attempt to create a gravitational reduction device that could produce clean energy”. (....) Not only was the yearslong monitoring of “Skinwalker” by NIDS unable to obtain proof of anything unusual happening, but the people who owned the property prior to the Shermans, a family whose members lived there 60 years, deny that any mysterious “phenomena” of any kind occurred there. The parsimonious explanation is that the supernatural claims about the ranch were made up by the Sherman family prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow. Many of the really bizarre alleged incidents described in Hunt for the Skinwalker were witnessed only by Terry Sherman, who stayed on the ranch as a caretaker after it was sold to Bigelow.

I'm game (he said, warily). 😀 Seriously, debunking implies an agenda, which as Swan points out is not what a scientific evaluation is about. It's really just seeing where, if anyplace, a set of observations and measurements and so on takes us as to a conclusion. Some events are just inconclusive in the traces they leave, some leave evidence that strongly suggest a terrestrial origin (the Marfa Lights seem to be an optical phenomenon with different temperature layers of desert air bending light from cars, IIRC), and some fall short of proving any hypothesis but do suggest possible hypotheses for future testing (like irradiated patches of soil, or EMF interference).

You are reframing my question. I was asking why personal tastes, not shared and not fueling bigoted conduct, should be discarded in this case. I didn't form the impression from @Intoscience that his distaste was driving epithets, prejudicial behavior, or advocacy of discrimination towards anyone. How does distaste, in this restricted sense, harm others? Why hope to eliminate it, especially when it's unclear that such a retrofit of personal tastes is achievable? Can I be made to like gangsta rap, and is that needed so that members of some hip-hop subculture won't feel bad? What about SMBD play? Should I discard all sentiments I might have regarding those practices lest someone somewhere feel oppressed? (it helps me if you can quote the entire paragraph here, btw, so context of questions is clear)

Most of the hype about dark chocolate comes, oddly enough from the chocolate industry. Pure cocoa (a nice cup of hot chocolate, add a little sugar) is good for you (polyphenols, nitric oxide boosting, vasodilation, improved insulin sensitivity, antidepressant, etc) but adding lots of saturated fats and sugars to make it into chocolate is not really improving it (in terms of health benefits; flavor is another matter) - and processing reduces the flavonol content generally. The higher cost for 100% is probably because fewer people buy that (it probably is more bitter and lacks the other ingredients that create a better mouthfeel), so the production runs are smaller. Small batch production always raises the price per unit.

I did infer that specificity and my reply was that the statement was wrong. It is wrong in the domain of human genetics, and is wrong more broadly applied as well. The field of study, behavioral genetics, studies the role of genes in behavior and psychological traits, and has no theoretic models in which everything is determined by genetics. Such a theory would be viewed as ridiculous, given the role that environmental influences play, and the way environment and epigenetics overlap with gene expression, and the way complex behaviors (particularly in humans and higher mammals) can emerge especially in novel situations. Also: A lot of this behavioral genetics material was covered earlier in the thread. @CharonY in particular took some time to cover this. Not reading the thread is a path to getting completely lost.

Your non-response to the major points of my previous post duly noted. Anyone who has investigated any incident knows that stories that "filter down through the years" do not gain in credibility or evidentiary value. Passage of time muddies and contaminates evidence. assumes facts not in evidence assumes facts not in evidence assumes facts not in evidence ...and the actual cause of the death was recorded, in the public record, and discovered by a researcher, one unbeguiled by an ET narrative. As was linked earlier in this thread: (Dunning again): Cherese, the young military police officer who died, did indeed die. The IPM report was not even necessary to tell us this, as there was nothing secret or strange about his death, which was reported in the newspapers. Cherese had had, for some time, a cyst under his left armpit, and had been scheduled for an operation to remove it even before the incident. Later, in the hospital, the surgical site became infected and he died — tragic, but neither unusual nor unexplained...

You made this statement. Everything. Your linked article makes no such assertion, and suggests only that genes play a role. That's quite a different thing. Perhaps then you should double-check. Ignoring objections to absolute statements you make is not good science, especially when you are clearly not trained in this field and can't seem to understand how profoundly erroneous is "everything is determined by genetics."

Why is that a hope? Still don't see why anyone's personal tastes, especially about what happens in other people's sex lives, have to be discarded. Why aren't you also hoping for the discard of other visceral disgusts and sharing them in other threads? Haven't heard a peep from you on visceral disgust for SMBD, and yet there's plenty of that disgust out there. No there aren't.

What theory of Dunning's are you referring to? He looked at the evidence and found it inconclusive. The theory seems to be all Mr Fox's. The "narrative" seems to be one fabricated by Friedman and swallowed whole by Fox. Dunning was doing a form of peer review, the necessary step of looking to poke holes in the data and methods of collection and interpretation. This is the essential part of science where errors and weak spots are discovered and hopefully remedied. Science cannot rely upon rumors that spread through small towns, especially when they are years in the past and magnified by time and money. Theories cannot be built from such. Your reading skills are not strong here. I have said many times at SFn that there is some probability of ET contact, but factors in the Drake equation suggest it is far from clear what that P is. Nor have I said witnesses are any one thing. Undoubtedly, there are hucksters who take eyewitness accounts and massage them into lucrative narratives. Witnesses are a range of personal qualities, so each is evaluated on an array of factors that help determine reliability. Sentence assumes things you have yet to prove. It is you who evidence a strong confirmation bias. Again, Sagan's Law is your friend. Begs the question on all these contact reports you keep posting. If their objective is quiet observation, what's up with all the up close and FTF stuff?

While letting Swan speak for himself, I will add that data isn't wrong but people can be if they draw conclusions from data that aren't really supported. Not conclusive just means that. No conclusion can be drawn. I'm totally cool with getting more data, and you may count me among those who would be awed, delighted, and thrilled to quivering pieces should we find that ET beings are visiting. This is one for Mr Ockham, eh? Given the history of the American West (me being both spouse and son-in-law of western historians), in which we find European settlement accompanied by a staggering number of grifters, hucksters, snake oil peddlers, and hoaxers, I think it's possible to lean strongly towards hoax (or, as you mentioned, shroom tripping.... 😀). No. I was just giving my take on the Brazil incident. I hope very much to take each report on its own merits. Where evidence is ambiguous so too must be our conclusions. And I raise a glass from "the vat" to looking hard and forensic thoroughness. And also to open and transparent interagency and public sharing of all findings so that science folk can do their jobs. Secrecy breeds conspiracy theories.

I would join in that speculation, based on personal knowledge of gay people who were bisexual at some point in their lives. I would guess the reverse, straight people who were bisexual or "experimented," would be less common. Survey data, from different decades, would be interesting to find, though such research might face challenges in terms of honesty of reporting.* I know of several gay people, and lesbians, who wanted to be primarily in a same-sex relationship but also wanted to have children and were not averse to procreative sex to achieve that. I didn't have the impression that there were major hurdles of disgust for them to vault over. (for those who did face such hurdles, AI came to the rescue) * an old joke about the Kinsey studies went something like: 90% of men masturbate, and 10% of men lie on questionnaires.

Source was the same one I posted up the page: Brian Dunning. I don't personally research every scientific issue myself, given the finite lifespan and being one person thing. His approach shows scientific rigor, not "preordained skepticism" whatever that is. Sounds like you are trolling, because you know the evidence here is incredibly flimsy and doesn't support that ardent desire to believe you share with your pal Fox Mulder. As for the length of the documentary (which, yes, I watched, and I'd love those minutes of my life back but what can ya do?), this seems like a weak shot (since I didn't specify the length of the video) and just more trolling because You Have Not One Shred of Evidence that deserves the term "evidence." You have a set of unrelated odd stories - some kids saw a strange man, someone saw some odd feet sticking out from under a blanket in a hospital, someone saw very short people in a hospital, some military trucks drove by....good Lord, I think Paul Bunyan had more empirical basis. We should probably be researching the existence of giant men who hang out with giant mules. Science has different standard than the law does. That was Swanson's point. The objective truth of what happened is not determined by voting or what narrative we might find "compelling." It is determined (to a reasonably high probability) by an abundance of solid data that constitutes evidence. No one needs to provide evidence that ETs did not visit Varginha - you can't disprove that sort of negative. Nor can anyone prove leprachauns never visited Varginha. The burden of proof is on you and the documentarian making all the extraordinary claims of alien visitation.

I'm glad that people here are at least noticing there are two different definitions. The second one seems like the one that is most widely used in philosophy, i.e. that atheism is an active belief (learned) that the universe does not have a deity of supernatural life force of any kind. Like most people, I feel that epistemological integrity (of the "who knows? there is no way to definitively disprove such an entity" variety) requires me to be agnostic. I generally assume that objective truths about the world are not dependent on my personal beliefs and that I am a finite creature who cannot have perfect knowledge of the universe and all conscious beings (god(s) or otherwise) in it. That agnosticism was also, I'm sure, learned. Anthropological evidence suggests that the default state of a human neural net is to view the world as somehow alive and full of spirits. We see a residue of that in the way that we personify inanimate objects. The sea was angry that day. My car is a stubborn bastard when it's cold in the morning. I hear the cottonwoods whispering above. The sun was merciless. Our primitive view of the world often emerges in poetry.

Again, the military arrival is easily fact checked. The convoy of military trucks going through town was nothing more than a convoy of military trucks going through town to be dropped off for scheduled maintenance, which was exactly what happened to them. The trucks dropping off strange mechanisms at the hospital were delivering new cardiovascular equipment. The ambulance was dropping off a corpse that had been exhumed as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. The pair of small aliens at the hospital were expectant parents having their baby delivered — and they were little people. All of this information is widely available and pops right up during the most cursory search. I find it laughable the way completely unrelated events are cobbled together into this Roswellian tale, and we now have a town who economic health undoubtedly now depends on its UFO museum and its flying saucer water tank. If you want to pursue real scientific evaluation of evidence, then don't allow your own desires to render you gullible, letting hucksters connect the dots for you in exploitative YouTube videos. As for teenage girls, their reliability as witnesses should be questioned. Especially given other details and the weather being described as a "blustery rainstorm". I used to have teenage girls in my house and I can well recall their departures from objective observation of odd events. And the way 90% of their vocal communication consisted of giggling.

I lived in Eugene, Oregon for a year, when Knight lived there with his wife Kate Wilhelm. They were local celebrities, but only saw them once, roaming a street fair. The story sounds familiar, probably because the library where I lived as a teenager had a complete collection of the Galaxy Readers, the annual compilations of Galaxy magazine. I remember his short stories as dark, sometimes darkly funny, sometimes disturbing....I think he had a couple in the Dangerous Visions anthology. Here's a web version... https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1953-02

Yes, I recall some famous sighting in either Brazil or Argentina which was mentioned in UFO literature back then. Similar elements. Thanks for the links - the 1896 account does sound Wellsian. The extremely low density of the ETs was a nice touch.

Is the wind flapping the flag or is my mind flapping the flag?

The IPM report even successfully identified the creature seen by the three young women. The place where the creature was spotted was the home of Luiz Antônio de Paula, about 30 years old and intellectually disabled, who lived there with his parents and family. As de Paula was nonverbal, locals had nicknamed him Mudinho, which means "little mute." Mudinho was known to the neighbors to spend his time crouching and examining small objects he found, like cigarette butts and sticks. There are photographs of him floating around the Portuguese language Internet — very skinny, hunched over, squatting as he studies a twig, and apparently wearing a diaper. At last report, Mudinho still lives there to this day, and still continues his favorite activity. The lead author of the IPM report, Lt. Col. Lúcio Carlos Pereira, wrote: As Mudinho did live there, and that was his typical behavior, then for the young women to have seen a space creature there would have to have been two such beings — the known one, Mudinho, and the hypothetical one, an alien — but as they reported only one skinny humanoid crouching in the mud, and not two, we are left with no rational support for there having been any beings present other than Mudinho. Today, the three women do still give interviews about their experience. There is one very important detail that has changed since their original story: Today, they say they knew Mudinho well, and had even given him cigarettes in the past; so of course they would not have mistaken him for an alien. However, in their original reports from 1996, they said they didn't know him, and took him for a devil when they saw him. It's one more example of stories changing and growing to fit a changing and growing narrative that gains mass traction in pop culture. Everyone wants to be in on it, and everyone wants to be seen as credible and correct. I agree with @Moontanman that there is a body of cases that do appear to represent truly anomalous and unexplained aerial events, and these may at some point turn out to be some fascinating atmospheric phenomenon that expands our view of things. They should not be dismissed, and should be studied. But these Stanton Friedman generated narratives are mostly self-promoting flapdoodle and just piss poor science. As Dunning notes: Friedman's whole career, in fact, consisted of compiling bits and pieces of poor-quality evidence, mainly unverified eyewitness testimony usually taken years or decades after an event; and then composing an original alien visitation story that incorporates all those bits and is presented as the factual account of what happened. He's best known as the original author of the Roswell mythology, in which he worked with a retired mortician named Glenn Dennis. In 1989 — more than four decades after the 1947 Roswell crash was alleged to have happened — Friedman carefully wove together a string of snippets of Dennis' assorted memories of having worked in that town, and created the story we know today of a spaceship crash and small alien bodies being recovered. It was published in 1991, the first time that story even existed. Friedman couldn't have cared less that the things Dennis thought he remembered actually took place over a span of twelve years and had nothing to do with each other; his goal was to craft an original UFO narrative. That was Friedman's thing. That was what he did professionally...

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4853 If you want the entire story as told by the UFOlogists, you have a great source. The 2022 documentary Moment of Contact interviews a number of the people who were involved, and presents it as a true case of alien visitation. It also offers a stark example of how these stories grow and change enormously over the years. Original eyewitnesses tend to add story elements, often bridging their own recollections to those of others; new people intrigued at the prospect of some notoriety always "come forward" and claim to have been there; and imaginative authors always, always, always add no end of creative enhancements that, over time, blend in and come to be accepted as part of the standard narrative. The inevitable result is a story full of incredible events, all supported by amazingly trustworthy eyewitnesses, all inexplicable as anything Earthly. Such a tapestry offers fertile soil for any documentary filmmaker. One thing such filmmakers hope you never do is go back and read the original newspaper accounts, because what you tend to discover is that almost nothing particularly interesting happened — until later years festooned the facts with embellishments....

(more tidbits from the Oxford link) The project involved 57 researchers who conducted over 40 separate studies in 20 countries representing a diverse range of cultures. The studies (both analytical and empirical) conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife, and that both theology and atheism are reasoned responses to what is a basic impulse of the human mind. (...) The...project...sought to find out whether concepts such as gods and an afterlife appear to be entirely taught or basic expressions of human nature. (....) Project Director Dr Justin Barrett, from the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, said: 'This project does not set out to prove god or gods exist. Just because we find it easier to think in a particular way does not mean that it is true in fact. If we look at why religious beliefs and practices persist in societies across the world, we conclude that individuals bound by religious ties might be more likely to cooperate as societies. Interestingly, we found that religion is less likely to thrive in populations living in cities in developed nations where there is already a strong social support network.' (me: this is pretty sketchy so i will be on the lookout for more detailed papers and PR research)

Good question. I'm just getting started on this, so DK yet. My guess is this has been a pretty active area of study in anthropology, so probably there's peer review out there.

Well I think Sagan was indicating the way that people tend to take folk beliefs about the world and causality and shape them into myths and metaphysical belief systems. This Oxford study found that people are predisposed to dualism and beliefs in spirits, gods, and afterlife. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm#:~:text=The studies (both analytical and,impulse of the human mind. There's other research as well. One person believing something might be just personal superstition. Add a few more people and pretty soon it's a religion, humans being social animals who like to share and organize their beliefs.